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Last month, the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission released the most accurate catalogue to date of positions and motions for a staggering 1.3 billion stars.

Let’s do a few comparisons so we can be suitably amazed. The total number of stars you can see without a telescope is less than 10,000. This includes visible stars in both the northern and southern hemispheres, so looking up on a very dark night will allow you to count only about half this number.

The data just released from Gaia is accurate to 0.04 milli-arcseconds. This is a measurement of the angle on the sky, and corresponds to the width of a human hair at a distance of over 300 miles (500 km.) These results are from 22 months of observations and Gaia will ultimately whittle down the stellar positions to within 0.025 milli-arcseconds, the width of a human hair at nearly 680 miles (1000 km.)

OK, so we are now impressed. But why is knowing the precise location of stars exciting to planet hunters?

The reason is that when we claim to measure the radius or mass of a planet, we are almost always measuring the relative size compared to the star. This is true for all planets discovered via the radial velocity and transit techniques — the most common exoplanet detection methods that account for over 95% of planet discoveries.

It means that if we underestimate the star size, our true planet size may balloon from being a close match to the Earth to a giant the size of Jupiter. If this is true for many observed planets, then all our formation and evolution theories will be a mess.

The size of a star is estimated from its brightness. Brightness depends on distance, as a small, close star can appear as bright as a distant giant. Errors in the precise location of stars therefore make a big mess of exoplanet data.

An artist’s impression of the Gaia spacecraft — which is on a mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Milky Way. In the process it will expand our understanding of the composition, formation and evolution of the galaxy. (ESA/D. Ducros)

This issue has been playing on the minds of exoplanet hunters.

In 2014, a journal paper authored by Fabienne Bastienfrom Vanderbilt University suggested that nearly half of the brightest stars observed by the Kepler Space Telescope are not regular stars like our sun, but actually are distant and much larger sub-giant stars.… Read more

Science fiction has become science. No habitable planets orbiting two suns like the fictional Tatooine have been detected so far, but more than a dozen “circumbinary planets” have been identified and many more are predicted. Exoplanets orbiting a host star that orbits its own companion star are even more common. (Lucasfilm)

When the the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, it featured the now-iconic two-sun, “circumbinary” planet Tatooine. At that time astronomers didn’t really know if such solar systems existed, with more than one sun and at least one planet.

Indeed, the first extra-solar planet wasn’t detected until the early 1990s. And the first actual circumbinary planet was detected in 2005, and it was a Jupiter-size planet orbiting a system composed of a sun-like star and a brown dwarf. Tatooine was definitely not a Jupiter-size planet.

But since then, the presence and distribution of circumbinaries has grown to a dozen and some the planets discovered orbiting the two stars have been smaller. The most recent discovery was announced this week and was made using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope

The new planet, called TOI (TESS Object of Interest)-1338 b, is about 6.9 times larger than Earth. It orbits its pair of host stars every 95 days, while the stars themselves orbit each other in 15 days.

As is common with binary stars, one is more massive and much brighter than the other (5976 K and 3657 K, respectively, with our sun at 5780 K), and as the planet orbits around it blocks some of the light from the brighter star.

This transit allows astronomers to measure the size of the planet. The transit — as scientific luck, or skill, would have it — was first found in the TESS data by a high school student working at NASA with over the summer, Wolf Cukier

“I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other and from our view eclipse each other every orbit,” Cukier said. “About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338.”

“At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.”

With all of the data available from observations past and current, planet hunting clearly isn’t the scientific Wild West that it used to be — although the results remain often eye-popping and surprising.… Read more

Artist impression of Proxima Centauri c. Press “HD” on the player for the best image quality (E. Tasker).

The discovery of Proxima Centauri b in 2016 caused a flood excitement. We had found an extrasolar planet around our nearest star, making this the closest possible world outside of our solar system!

But despite its proximity, discovering more about this planet is difficult. Proxima Centauri b was found via the radial velocity technique, which measures the star’s wobble due to the gravity of the orbiting planet. This technique gives a minimum mass, the average distance between the star and planet and the time for one orbit, but no details about conditions on the planet surface.

If the planet had transited its star, we might have tried detecting starlight that passed through the planet’s atmosphere. This technique is known as transit spectroscopy, and reveals the composition of a planet’s atmosphere by detecting what wavelengths of light are absorbed by the molecules in the planet’s air. But searches for a transit proved fruitless, suggesting the planet’s orbit did not pass in front of the star from our viewpoint.

The radial velocity technique measures the motion of the star due to the gravity of the planet. As the star moves away from the Earth, its light becomes stretched and redder. As it moves back towards Earth, the light shifts to bluer wavelengths. The technique gives the planet’s period, distance from the star and its minimum mass. (E. Tasker)

Another option for planet characterization is to capture a direct image of the planet. This is one of the most exciting observational techniques, as it reveals the planet itself, not its influence on the star. Temporal changes in the planet’s light could reveal surface features as the planet rotates, and if enough light is detected to analyze different wavelengths, then the atmospheric composition could be deduced.

But direct imaging requires that the planet’s light can be differentiated from the much brighter star. With our current instruments, Proxima Centauri b orbits too close to its star to be distinguished. This seemed to close the door on finding out more about our nearest neighbors, until the discovery of a second planet in the system was announced early this year.

Also identified via the radial velocity technique, Proxima Centauri c has a minimum mass of 5.8 Earth masses. It sits further out than its sibling, with a chilly orbit that takes 5.2… Read more

Artist rendering of an “eyeball world,” where one side of a tidally locked planet is always hot on the sun-facing side and the back side is frozen cold. Definitely a tough environment, but might some of the the planets be habitable at the edges? Or might winds carry sufficient heat from the front to the back? (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The very first planet detected outside our solar system powerfully made clear that our prior understanding of what planets and solar systems could be like was sorely mistaken.

51 Pegasi was a Jupiter-like massive gas planet, but it was burning hot rather than freezing cold because it orbited close to its host star — circling in 4.23 days. Given the understandings of the time, its existence was essentially impossible.

Yet there it was, introducing us to what would become a large and growing menagerie of weird planets.

Hot Jupiters, water worlds, Tatooine planets orbiting binary stars, diamond worlds (later downgraded to carbon worlds), seven-planet solar systems with planets that all orbit closer than Mercury orbits our sun. And this is really only a brief peak at what’s out there — almost 4,000 exoplanets confirmed but billions upon billions more to find and hopefully characterize.

I thought it might be useful — and fun — to take a look at some of the unusual planets found to learn what they tell us about planet formation, solar systems and the cosmos.

Artist’s conception of a hot Jupiter, CoRoT-2a. The first planet discovered beyond our solar system was a hot Jupiter similar to this, and this surprised astronomers and led to the view that many hot Jupiters may exist. That hypothesis has been revised as the Kepler Space Telescope found very few distant hot Jupiters and now astronomers estimate that only about 1 percent of planets are hot Jupiters. (NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech)

Let’s start with the seven Trappist-1 planets. The first three were detected two decades ago, circling a”ultra-cool” red dwarf star a close-by 40 light years away. Observations via the Hubble Space Telescope led astronomers conclude that two of the planets did not have hydrogen-helium envelopes around them, which means the probability increased that the planets are rocky (rather than gaseous) and could potentially hold water on their surfaces.

Artistic view of the aftermath of a supernova explosion, with an unexpected white dwarf remnant. These super-dense but no longer active stars are thought to play a key role in many supernovae explosion. (Copyright Russell Kightley).

White dwarf stars, the remnant cores of low-mass stars that have exhausted all their nuclear fuel, are among the most dense objects in the sky.

Their mass is comparable to that of the sun, while their volume is comparable to that of Earth. Very roughly, this means the average density of matter in a white dwarf would be on the order of 1,000,000 times greater than the average density of the sun.

Thought to be the final evolutionary state of stars whose mass is not high enough to become a neutron star — a category that includes the sun and over 97% of the other stars in the Milky Way — they are dim objects first identified a century ago but only in the last decade the subject of broad study.

In recent years the white dwarfs have become more and more closely associated with supernovae explosions, though the processes involved remained hotly debated. A team using the Hubble Space Telescope even captured before and after images of what is hypothesized to be an incomplete white dwarf supernova. What was left behind has been described by some as a “zombie star.”

Now a team of astronomers led by Stephane Vennes of the Czech Academy of Sciences has detected another zombie white dwarf, LP-40-365 , that they put forward as a far-flung remnant of a long-ago supernova explosion. This is considered important and unusual because it would represent a first detection of such a remnant long after the supernova conflagration.

This dynamic is well captured in an animation accompanying the Science paper that describes the possible remnant. Here’s the animation and a second-by-second description of what is theorized to have occurred:

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There are many worlds out there waiting to fire your imagination. This site is for everyone interested in the burgeoning field of exoplanet detection and research, from the general public to scientists in the field. It will present columns, news stories and in-depth features, as well as the work of guest writers.

The “Many Worlds” column is supported by the Lunar Planetary Institute/USRA and informed by NASA's NExSS initiative, a research coordination network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability. Any opinions expressed are the author’s alone.